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Revision as of 10:58, 19 July 2017

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    Influenza A can be spread rapidly throughout poultry flocks and cause severe illnesses, or even deaths in human. The most notorious pandemic was the "Spanish Flu" in 1918, which killed 50 million people worldwide (1). Influenza A virus poses large social and economic burden. Each year in the United States, it is estimated that around 600,000 lives and 90 billion US dollars are lost due to influenza A virus (2). Influenza A can be subtyped according to the types of hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) on the virus surface. Since there are 16 types of HA and 9 types of NA, there are 144 possible subtypes. Different Influenza A subtype show different properties. For example, the mortality rate of inflection by the subtypes H5N1 and H7N9 is much higher than that of H1N1.




    Altogether, the project aims to apply toehold switch technology in influenza A subtyping and offer a convenient tool to facilitate the design of toehold switch. It is hoped that our method could suppress the spread of pathogenic Influenza in a timely manner.




    Impact

    a. Disease control: On-site detection allows immediate identification of pathogenic host and stop the spread of pandemics.

    b. Reduce the production cost of detection methods:A estimated price of less than 25 USD allows mass production and widespread of technology worldwide to less developed countries.

    c. Minimize medical errors:Reduce pre-analytical process to minimize possible errors.

    Objectives:

    (i)Subtyping of Influenza A: Toehold switch can subtype Influenza A by complementary pairing between detecting region with of hemagglutimin gene and neuramindase gene.

    (ii)On-site detection:A paper-based detection system is portable and readily available for inspections in chicken farm and country border.

    (iii)Intuitive readout:The interpretation of result is intuitive and easy to layman by simply reading different combination of reporter signals on test paper (Fig 1).

    (iv)Semi-automatic toehold switch design: By linking to Influenza A sequence database, and embedding Vienna RNA (8) in our program, we can minimize the manpower and time on toehold switch design, while giving reliable results.

    (v)Standardized toehold switch cloning: With a cloning standard, a new switch can be made by synthesizing the detection sequence and inserting it into standard vector.

    References

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    Inspiration

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